Franklin Benjamin Sanborn
N 42° 27.828 W 071° 20.599
19T E 307342 N 4703934
American journalist, author, philanthropist, and abolitionist.
Waymark Code: WME75
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 06/04/2006
Views: 61
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (December 15, 1831 - February 24, 1917)
Franklin Sanborn was born in Hampton Falls,
New Hampshire in 1831. A descendant of an old New England family, Sanborn attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard
University.
After graduating from Harvard in 1855, Sanborn moved to Concord, Massachusetts, where he became active in the abolitionist
cause. He was a friend of John Brown, and became
Brown's agent in New England. Sanborn was a member of the Secret Six,
a group of six wealthy men who secretly funded Brown's activities, although Sanborn disapproved of Brown's 1859 raid
at Harper's Ferry. Following the raid, the U.S. Senate issued a summons and then arrest orders in order to get Sanborn
to testify about his role in the Harper's Ferry raid. For two months he was evaded capture, until the Massachusetts
Supreme Court intervened.
Following the activities surrounding Harper's Ferry, Sanborn continued the career he had begun in journalism,
and in 1863 he became an editor of the Boston Commonwealth. In 1867 he joined the staff of the Springfield
(Massachusetts) Republican, keeping an active role until 1914. Throughout his career, Sanborn was
involved in a number of philanthropic organizations and charitable causes, and was a founder
of the American Social Science Association and editor of its journal. He served as secretary of the
Massachusetts Board of Charities and helped found the Massachusetts Infant Asylum, the Clarke School for Deaf Mutes,
and the National Prison Association.
As a member of the Concord intellectual community, Sanborn was familiar with many of the luminaries of literary
New England. Listed among his biographical works are Henry D. Thoreau (1882), The Life and Letters of John Brown (1885),
A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy, 2 vol. (1893; with W.T. Harris),
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1901), Hawthorne and His Friends (1908),
Recollections of Seventy Years, 2 vol. (1909), and The Life of Henry David Thoreau (1917).
Sanborn died in 1917 at the age of 85. He is interred in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts,
not far from the final resting place of some of the very authors which served as the subject of his biographies.
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